Dr. Robert L. Bertini was appointed in August 2016 as the 4th Executive Director of the Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR) and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of South Florida. He is also the director of the National Institute for Congestion Reduction, a new National University Transportation Center, and of the National Center for Transit Research. Dr. Bertini’s primary research and teaching interests are in sustainable transportation solutions, traffic flow theory informed by empirical and experimental measurements, intelligent transportation systems, public transportation, “big data” for improving performance measurement, planning and operations, and proactive traffic management and operations.

Dr. Bertini is currently the chair of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Operations Section (AHB00), overseeing 13 committees. He served as a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society. Dr. Bertini received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, where he developed an online multimodal transportation data repository that is a platform for performance measurement, modeling and prediction. The recipient of many awards, he received the DeFazio Transportation Hall of Fame Award and was invited to deliver the Ogden Lecture at Monash University in Australia.

He was the founding director of the Portland State University Intelligent Transportation Systems Laboratory and of the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium (OTREC), a statewide, university transportation center focused on sustainable transportation solutions. He also served in the Obama Administration as Deputy Administrator of the Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA) at the U.S. Department of Transportation where he also led the Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office and chaired the Department’s Innovation Council. He was also on the faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering at his alma mater, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, where he developed the Transportation Engineering Student Project Area (TESPA) and co-led the award winning Institute of Transportation Engineers student chapter.

He earned his B.S. in Civil Engineering from California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo, an M.S. in Civil Engineering from San Jose State University, and a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Bertini is a licensed professional engineer in the states of Florida, California and Oregon. He has been recognized as a Fellow by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) as a Fellow by the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) and as a Senior Member by IEEE.